Jonas Meier

German Aerospace Center (DLR) | DLR · Earth Observation Center

The monitoring of irrigated areas still represents a complex and laborious challenge in land use classification. The extent and location of irrigated areas vary in both methodology and scale. One major reason for discrepancies is the choice of spatial resolution. This study evaluates the influence of spatial resolution on the mapped extent and spat...

Miscalculating the volumes of water withdrawn for irrigation, the largest consumer of freshwater in the world, jeopardizes sustainable water management. Hydrological models quantify water withdrawals, but their estimates are unduly precise. Model imperfections need to be appreciated to avoid policy misjudgements.

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa. Projections suggest that an increasingly variable occurrence of precipitation and rising temperatures will lead to considerable harvest losses. With traditional rain-fed agriculture, extreme variability in precipitation and frequent droughts and floods, food production in Sub-S...

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges for agriculture in West Africa. Traditional agriculture, based on the rainy season, is threatened by rising temperatures and increasingly variable occurrence of precipitation. Due to climate change the normally regular occurrence of the rainy season is shifting, the growing season is becoming shorter...

Irrigation agriculture is the most important user of the global freshwater resources worldwide, which makes it one of the key actors conditioning sustainable development and water security. The anticipated future climate change, population growth, and rapidly rising global demand for food will likely lead to agricultural expansion by allowing the d...

An assessment of the human impact on the global water cycle requires estimating the volume of water withdrawn for irrigated agriculture. A key parameter in this calculation is the irrigation efficiency, which corrects for the fraction of water lost between irrigation withdrawals and the crop due to management, distribution or conveyance losses. Her...

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa. Projections suggest that an increasingly variable occurrence of precipitation and rising temperatures will lead to considerable harvest losses of up to 50%. This is affecting the African agricultural sector, including Burkina Faso, a country where the agricultural sector plays...

High-resolution (5–50 m) remote sensing satellite sensors provide a reliable, free and open data infrastructure for public and private agriculture and land use services. The further market penetration of these services critically depends on the fraction of agricultural fields and area that the services can cover. EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CA...

Agriculture is the largest global consumer of water. Irrigated areas constitute 40 % of the total area used for agricultural production (FAO, 2014a) Information on their spatial distribution is highly relevant for regional water management and food security. Spatial information on irrigation is highly important for policy and decision makers, who a...

Agriculture is the largest global consumer of water. Irrigated areas contribute to 40 % of the agricultural production. Information on their spatial distribution is highly relevant for regional water management and food security. Spatial information on irrigation is highly important for policy and decision makers who are facing the transition towar...

Many concerns have been raised about urban sprawl and the subsequent disappearance of agricultural land. Regulations have been put in place to reduce urban sprawl and protect agricultural areas in many countries, but how much potentially crop suitable land really is endangered by urban areas on a global scale has not been addressed so far. In this...